Since the continued growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has caused many climate problems, carbon dioxide has now attracted widespread attention around the world. There are two ways to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, one of which is to store carbon dioxide physically, and the other is to convert carbon dioxide chemically. It is well known that carbon dioxide is an abundant-rich, inexpensive, non-toxic and renewable C1 monomer, and therefore converting carbon dioxide into some useful materials is a more advocated practice. However, due to the lower reactivity of carbon dioxide, its application in the field of chemical synthesis has been greatly limited. There are currently very few polymerizations that make efficient use of carbon dioxide, in which the most famous one and also the most widely studied one in the world is the copolymerization of carbon dioxide and epoxy compounds; although this copolymerization is highly reactive, it has a number of unavoidable disadvantages such as harsh reaction conditions, complex catalyzers, and inflexibility of monomer design, such that it fails to achieve the diverse properties of polymers. Others such as copolymerization of carbon dioxide and glycol, copolymerization of carbon dioxide, glycol and dihalide, and the like are not highly reactive.
The development of new alkyne-based polymerizations is very important for polymer materials science. Alkynes are one of the readily available or easily synthesized chemical materials. The use of alkynes to construct functional polymers has important academic and technical significance and has attracted wide attention of scientists. However, there have been few reports on the copolymerization of alkynes and carbon dioxide.